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English Department Research

The English Department offers many research opportunities to students. Each spring, Hamline students are invited to apply for summer collaborative research grants. These grants can help provide the money, resources, and time to allow students to work with a faculty advisor over a ten week period to research a topic of their choosing. In addition, Hamline students are annually selected from a nationwide pool of applicants to present their work in English at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research.

2010 Undergraduate Research Presentations

Each year, Hamline students are selected from a nationwide pool of applicants to present their work in English at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research. English majors and minors who presented at NCUR from April 15-17 2010 during the 24th annual conference, hosted by University of Montana in Missoula included:

Loren Michelle Alfaro, advisor Marcela Kostihova, “Who is America? A look into Hollywood’s silent segregation and the use of Shakespeare as a tool for building ‘America’”

Departmental Honors Projects 2010-2011

"Nosferatu Nostalgia: The Confederate Vampire"By Katie Campion

The emergence of the Civil War Southern gentleman vampire in contemporary fiction indicates a growing cultural nostalgia for the South as an idyllic pastoral. In the United States, the geographic South has historically been associated with the edenic plantation an ideal which the Southern Gentlemen vampire propagates because he has never changed during his existence through history. His immortality makes him a paragon of the age in which he was “vampirized”; because of this insipidity, he is a theoretically “accurate” representation of the Civil War era.

Famed journalist and literary critic H.L. Mencken had much in common with one of the darlings of his critical pen, Sinclair Lewis. Mencken and Lewis were both unabashed elitists, and their works do bear marked similarities. Lewis’ landmark lambasting of Christian fundamentalism, Elmer Gantry, is even dedicated to Mencken with “profound admiration.” Nonetheless, Lewis’ Midwestern upbringing and the time he spent in a socialist commune tint his works with a touch of progressivism somewhat at odds with Mencken’s more libertarian outlook, a tension which has gone largely unexamined, an oversight this project seeks to correct.